The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage International)

so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Stuck in the back of the frame there was a crayoned note, left one day on the kitchen counter in Malibu: Dear Mom, when you opened the door it was me who ran away XXXXXX—Q.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

I was trying to work out what time it had been when he died and whether it was that time yet in Los Angeles.

Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.

We walked every morning. We did not always walk together because we liked different routes but we would keep the other’s route in mind and intersect before we left the park.

Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star.

He looked back. Even today I have no idea what made him look back.

Two cords of stacked wood had not kept the woman in the house across Marlboro Street from becoming a widow at dinner.